links for 2008-11-11

That question has been rattling around in my mind for the last few days, as the chatter about the role of the cloud in business IT has intensified. The discussion to date has largely had a retrospective cast, focusing on the costs and benefits of shifting existing IT functions and operations from in-house data centers into the cloud. How can the cloud absorb what we're already doing? is the question that's being asked, and answering it means grappling with such fraught issues as security, reliability, interoperability, and so forth. To be sure, this is an important discussion, but I fear it obscures a bigger and ultimately more interesting question: What does the cloud allow us to do that we couldn't do before?